When covering the grappling scene out here in California, one usually refers to either the Los Angeles area, which has the highest concentration of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu outside of Brazil, or the fearsome teams from the San Francisco Bay Area, however San Diego is rarely mentioned.
When covering the grappling scene out here in California, one usually refers to either the Los Angeles area, which has the highest concentration of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu outside of Brazil, or the fearsome teams from the San Francisco Bay Area, however San Diego is rarely mentioned. Then along came Dean Lister, who definitely put San Diego on the map by winning the Abu Dhabi Absolute Championships and staking himself a claim as one of the finest grapplers in the world. It was on Dean`s invitation that I covered his in house tournament at City Boxing. Unfortunately I missed some of the best action of the day when I got caught in traffic leaving the Los Angeles Area (And even worse, one of my tapes appears to have been destroyed limiting the amount of footage I could upload for everyone. Especially tragic considering Jocko even paused the activities to let me set up my camera!). When I got to City Boxing the place was packed however, and there were both grapping matches and boxing matches in progress. I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout however, in addition to the house team from City Boxing representatives from a number of schools came out including Fabio Santos, Roy Harris`s Team Magnitude Team, Charlie Kholer`s San Diego Fight Clubschool, Team Takagawa (I`m positive I`m misspelling this so please forgive me), Rodrigo Meiderios`s School Ryan Gregg and RCJ Machado`s team and Joao Cunha of Ralph Gracie San Diego! Whew! That`s a pretty high concentration of talent indeed! All this nestled in beautiful San Diego, which actually has much more to recommend it other than it`s close proximity to Tijuana (think of the benefits of Los Angeles minus the traffic and plastic). Dean and crew planning on holding another tournament soon and it would be well worth the journey to San Diego, one of the most underrated scenes around!